Suspicious Minds
How Culture Shapes Madness
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A “clear, witty, and engaging” (The Boston Globe) journey through the brain that connects neuroscience, biology, and culture. An “intellectual landmark” (Edward Shorter, Literary Review of Canada).
The current view of delusions—the strange beliefs held by people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses—is that they are the result of biology gone awry, of neurons in the brain misfiring. In Suspicious Minds, Dr. Joel Gold and his brother Ian Gold argue that delusions are the result of the interaction between the brain and the social world. They present “a dual broadside: against a psychiatric profession that has become infatuated with neuroscience as part of its longstanding attempt to establish itself as ‘real medicine,’ and against a culture that has become too networked for its own good” (The New York Times). The book “amounts to nothing less than a frontal—or perhaps pre-frontal—challenge to the dominant view of modern psychiatry, which looks to neuroscience to explain disorders of the mind” (The Washington Post).
In “a droll Oliver Sacksian tone” (The Village Voice), the Golds reveal intriguing case studies: the man who was dead and in hell, the woman who could raise the dead at Ground Zero, the man who killed God, and the people who believed they were like the characters in the film The Truman Show. These “page-turning case studies” (New Republic) of delusion “offer a fascinating and intimate portrait of psychosis” (Scientific American). “They provide more proof that no fantasist can hope to match the wonders—and horrors—of the human mind” (The Washington Post).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brothers Joel (of the NYU School of Medicine) and Ian Gold (of McGill University) combine their knowledge and experience as psychiatrists to shed light on the history and future of the study of mental disorders, focusing on what is called the "Truman Show delusion." They reject the idea that neuroscience and the brain are the determinants in the emergence of delusions "what sorts of pills to prescribe and which kind of misfiring neurons the pills are meant to target" and instead attempt to link social life changes to psychosis: "What this pill-and-neuron story misses is the larger narrative of social and cultural life going on around every patient, around every neuron." Changes in social life like bullying, immigration, and even urban living are presented as potential factors in the emergence of schizophrenia, but the Golds do not provide enough convincing evidence to support their position. They also discuss how a faulty Theory of Mind "the ability human beings have to think about the thoughts and feelings of others" or "suspicion system," a "special purpose" mechanism that helps individuals navigate through social situations, can result in signs of schizophrenia. The link between both concepts and environmental factors is weak; readers are left to assume they are neurological issues. What the Gold brothers end up demonstrating is that no simple answer can fully explain what happens when a person has "faulty reasoning." Figs. & illus.
